Wonder Ponder, Visual Philosophy for Children, is an imprint specialising in products for fun and engaging thinking. This website provides accompanying material to our Wonder Ponder boxes, including guides for children, parents and mediators, ideas for wonderpondering and fun games and activities. It is also a platform for sharing your very own Wonder Ponder content and ideas.

Wonder Ponder Blog

The Wonder Ponder blog includes posts on the creative processes behind our Visual Philosophy for Children material, as well as workshop experiences, guest posts on a variety of topics and generally interesting, eye-catching or mind-bloggling stuff we feel like sharing with you.

Last month, Koiné Filosófica, in collaboration with Wonder Ponder, launched the competition 'How do you know you are not a robot?', echoing the cover of the our latest Visual Philosophy for Children title, I, Person:

The instructions were clear:

1.- 'Like' the Wonder Ponder and Koiné Filosófica Facebook pages2.- Share3.- Send us an image/video of your children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, cousins, etc. with the answer to the question: 'How do you know you are not a robot?'

The prize? A free copy of I, Person!

Wonder Ponder creators Ellen Duthie and Daniela Martagón were given the hard task of being the jury in the competition and choosing the winning entry. After a lot of thinking and many 'oh! but we like them all! they had to choose one.

The winner is..

Xiana! Congratulations from all the Wonder Ponder team. Here is the picture she sent with her answer. Below is a translation into English of what she said and an explanation of why the jury chose this entry.

'I know that I am not a robot because: I can feel it when I'm sad or serious or happy and because I change shape every year. Robots are always the same shape, height and width. When I was three, I had short hair, I was shorter and my face was flatter I wore shoe size 12. Now I am ten years old, I have long hair, my nails are growing and I wear shoe size 32. Robots, on the other hand, are always the same shape. For example: 20 cm wide, 1 metre 40 cm tall and 29 shoe size. They are always that shape until they break and shatter into little pieces. Their nails and their hair don't grow either."

We really loved Xiana's answer. Daniela (the illustrator) was particularly taken with the nail growth argument. Ellen (the writer) was very interested in the thoughts on change. And we would like to suggest another question for us to wonder and ponder about some more: If you have changed so much (almost entirely) since the age of three, are you actually the same person? What has remained the same in you all along?

Thank you very much to everybody for taking part. We have loved watching/reading and listening to all your answers.

Until next time!

We leave you with some of the other entries we have also loved. .

The video sent to us by Artesanos del pensamiento, in México (which was unfortunately not in the territory for the competition) was WONDERFUL!. They also told us how they talked about the competition question at school:

This is what they told us on Facebook: Today in our last school session, we have been talking about ROBOTS. We have behaved like robots, drawn robots and spoken a bit about how we know that we are NOT robots. We also made robots out of plasticine. We had a great time. We want to thank Wonder Ponder and Koiné Filosofica for asking us the question! Here are some of the answers that came up.Armando "I'm not a robot because I have blood"Luigi "Humans have cells that protect us from viruses and robots do not"Juan Pablo "I am not a robot because I don't have any wires on my head"Angel "I am not a robot because I don't have an owner to tell me what to do"Cony "I have hair; robots don't"Santi "I have shoes and robots have boots"

We have also really enjoyed the entries from Margarita and Ángela:

In particular, there was one argument given by Margarita that we thought was very interesting. 'I know I am not a robot because I always get stung by mosquitoes.' Thank you, Margarita!

Ángela says: 'I know I am nota robot because I robot doesn't have a heart and I know I do have one. And if a robot does not have a heart, they cannot feel love or feelings'. Thank you very much, Ángela!

And last but not least, here are some questions so that we can wonder and ponder some more:

IF SOMEONE COPIED ALL THE INFORMATION FROM YOUR BRAIN ON TO A HARD DISK AND INSERTED IT IN A ROBOT, WOULD THE ROBOT BECOME YOU?

IF YOU WERE ACTUALLY A ROBOT, WOULD YOU RATHER NOT KNOW THE TRUTH?

WOULD THERE BE ANY ADVANTAGES TO BEING A ROBOT RATHER THAN BEING A PERSON?